Questions, ideas, notes for discussion
- This week, I am hoping that we would start discussing Pierre Bourdieu's 1960s piece Kabyle (Berber) house and Paul Silverstein's very recent critique of it. Bourdieu's Kabyle House is one of the most often cited ethnographies of domestic space. It is writtent early in his carrier from a "structuralist" point of view, but later in his carreer, he critiqued his own work and became one of the leaders of "poststructuralist" thought, whose writings on social practice became extremely influential on humanities and social sciences, especially anthropology. His concept of habitus appeared as a remarkable critique of structuralist approaches to society and culture. Paul Siverstein's article not only very nicely reviews the Kabyle House article in the light of Bourdieu's later theoretical work and discusses it in the context of his own ethnographic/ethnohistorical work on Algerians and their house culture. Let's start the discussion with discussing these two complimentary works, and start to discuss the problems of dealing with domestic space, how do we study spaces and places that are culturally, socio-symbolically charged and meaning-ful. Then I will try to show an excerpt from the documentary Architecture of mud, and we can extend our discussion of the vernacular domestic spaces with Suzanne Blier's work on houses of West Africa, which gives a more recent account of her ethnographic work.
- Here is a methodological question. Bourdieu's work on the Kabyle house demonstrates how complex the spaces in which we live are in their symbolic associations, everyday fluidity of their various functions, cultural meanings, social configurations, spatial hermeneutics. How does one get to know, excavate, arrive at such complexity of domestic spaces, houses, through ethnographic fieldwork? What are the possible methodologies that needs to be employed towards arriving at such a knowledge of the space of everday life? If we were dealing with an ancient house through excavation, how much of this body of knowledge we have access to? Here we could talk about the field of "ethnoarchaeology", the intersection of ethnographic and archaeological research. How does ethnography, ethno-history, anthropology and archaeology inform each other?
- What are Paul Siverstein's criticisms of Bourdieu's portrayal of akham, the Kabyle house, as a "fully structured space"?. In Bourdieu's later definition of habitus (extensively discussed by Silverstein) how does akham operate as a habitus? Discussing Paul's argument, we can perhaps focus on "rooting and uprooting" as arboreal metaphors for cultural phenomena, and the "structural nostalgia" of Bourdieu.
- "The fullness of the house" (la'mmara ukham), that Bourdieu speaks of, is a fascinating metaphor as a critique of modern(ist) conceptions of space as an emptiness, a void. The space of the akham is defined by that fullness, not only because of the material assemblage gathered in the house, but also with its significations of prosperity, wealth, liveliness, well-being of the household, its inhabitants, and by extension its space. Thoughts?